Samsung Unveils The Exynos 4 Quad SoC; To Power The Galaxy S3

It looks like Samsung could not wait until May 3rd for its Unpacked Event in London to unveil the SoC inside its hotly anticipated Galaxy S3. In a press release today, Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 4 Quad SoC, which will be powering its next Galaxy handset.

The Exynos 4 Quad SoC pack in four-physical Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1.4GHz each, and is made on the 32nm HKMG fabrication processor from Samsung. Sammy states that the Exynos 4 Quad provides nearly double the performance of the Exynos 4210 based on the 45nm fabrication process, while consuming 20% less power. While Samsung did not mention the exact GPU used inside the Exynos 4 Quad, rumors suggest that it packs in a higher clocked variant of the ARM Mali-400MP GPU.

Compared to the Exynos 4210, Exynos 4 Quad also features power gating for all the four cores, along with frequency and voltage scaling. Samsung also mentions that the Exynos 4 Quad is pin-compatible with the Exynos 4210, thus making the upgrade path of OEMs easier.

Frankly, I was really expecting the Samsung Galaxy S3 to use a dual-core A15 based processor. There is still very limited use of a quad-core SoC in mobile phones, and two faster A15 cores can easily outperform a quad-core SoC in real-life mobile usage.